Abraham Saw the Pillar of Fire Over Mount Moriah

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Three Days and No Mountain

Abraham got up before the light, split the wood for the fire himself, and saddled the donkey. He took two young men with him. One was Ishmael, his son by Hagar, the boy he had already sent out into the wilderness once. The other was Eliezer, the steward who ran his household and who would have inherited all of it if Isaac had never been born.

He had been told to go to the land of Moriah and offer his son on one of the mountains there. Which mountain, God had not said. He would be shown.

They walked north out of Beersheba into the hill country, four men and an animal. The first day passed. The knife lay wrapped in the pack against the donkey's flank, and Isaac walked beside it without asking what it was for. The second day passed. Every ridge they climbed looked like the ridge behind it. Nothing was marked. Nothing was said.

The Place Called Watchers

On the third day they came up to a place the old traditions call Zophim, which means the watchers.

Abraham lifted his eyes. Ahead of him, on one mountain out of all the mountains in that country, a pillar of fire stood from the ground to the sky. It did not spread and it did not move. Above it hung a heavy cloud, and the glory of God rested on the cloud.

He had spent three days asking for a place. He was looking at one.

What Isaac Answered

"My son," Abraham said. "Do you see on that mountain what I see upon it?"

Isaac followed his father's eyes to the ridge. "I see," he said. "A pillar of fire and a cloud, and the glory of the Lord is upon the cloud."

The answer went into Abraham like cold water. The fire had not shown itself to one man who needed directions. It had shown itself to both of them, and the second of them was the boy who would be carrying the wood up that slope within the hour.

He knew then that his son had been accepted, and that the acceptance had come before he laid a single stone of the altar.

You Are Like the Ass and You See Nothing

Abraham turned to the two behind him. "Do you also see what we see upon that mountain?"

Ishmael and Eliezer squinted where he pointed. Rock. Scrub. Heat lifting off the stone. "We see nothing more than the other mountains," they said. "We see only desert."

He looked at them a moment longer and reckoned them as dull as the animal they had been leading.

"Abide here with the ass," he told them. "You are like the ass. As little as it sees, so little do you see."

So they sat down in the sand with the donkey. The son who had a claim on him and the servant who had once stood to inherit everything, the only two people on that road who might have taken hold of his arm and argued, stayed at the bottom of the hill because they could not see a fire that was burning in front of them.

His Own Mouth Sent Both of Them Back Down

"I and Isaac my son will go yonder," Abraham said, "and we will worship there before the Lord, and this evening we will return to you."

He said it to close the conversation. He did not hear what he had said. Yonder, koh, was the word God had used on the night He took him outside and showed him the sky: so, koh, shall your seed be. Abraham had walked three days with a knife toward the end of that word. Then he stood at the foot of the mountain and used it himself to promise two men that two people would come back down before dark.

He shouldered the fire. Isaac took the wood. They climbed toward the pillar, and the pillar stayed exactly where it was. Behind them the two young men waited beside the animal, and for them the ridge ahead was still only rock and heat and a long walk home.